November 28, 2009

Sanofi Go Meals iPhone Ap

Go Meals was too something to be useful. The serving size data was inconsistent. Oh and it has a huge restaurant fetish.

When I can't SWAG a number to bolus the kids, I want a fast reference. How many carbs are in a cup of Mac and Cheese? What my world needs is an easy to use food database. This isn't it.

My dear friends across the pond have a great word for this kind of thing: Rubbish.

When it opened, Go Meals wanted to put food on Today's Plate. First it wanted to know if I was cooking or eating out. Seriously it opened by asking if I would like to Restaurant. Apparently Restaurant is something to do.

You are not going anywhere until you pick either Add Food or Restaurant.

You have to pick one or the other. That is the design of the ap. I picked add food. It wanted to be sure that I didn't mean to restaurant 'cause Restaurant Foods was the second option on the add food menu. Before the food store.

You can Always choose Restaurant

Oh and just in case I needed a Restaurant and didn't know where one was, (just a half a mile from the railroad track?) I could hit the Go Meals' Restaurant button on the bottom navigation bar at any time. Like say I was in the food store and couldn't cope with the concept of cooking. Go Meals was ready to help.

I skipped over Restaurant and picked Grocery & Generic Foods. I typically use a blue box. It isn't generic but it is one you may have seen on TV. They have Mac & Cheese shelf space in every food store in the country. It wasn't listed.

I gave up on Mac. How about spaghetti and meatballs? I found that in the Generic Foods the serving size was per "svg."

I don't know how much a "svg." is but SRV to me is Stevie Ray Vaughan. So is that a Stevie Ray Vaughan of pasta by volume or weight?

How Many SVGs in SRV?

Other spaghetti and meatballs came in more traditional volume based servicing sizes. That is good but consistency on serving sizes would be a plus.

I gave up again! I decided to go to Restaurant. One with Golden Arches.

I looked up chicken "Selects" at Mickey D's. I couldn't find just the brand name strips in the ap. I could find a meal (3 pc) with.... With something. I am guessing fries and a Coke. Wonder what serving size fries and a Coke?

I am think way big because this is after all America and extra value means extra food. I know we bolus for a less than that what Go Meals said the carb count is when we do go to McD' for a chicken select meal.

(3pc) with... what?

I gave up yet again and tried to look up an everything bagel from back at the super market. I found pizza three cheese bagels.

I playing with this thing I did add all these foods to my "Plate." Once there, it wasn't real clear how to get them off. So I had Trader Joe's Mac, two types of spaghetti and meatballs, a value meal and pizza bagels. Probably also a partridge pear tree but the serving size of partridge was in SRVs.

I gave up on Go Meals.

In fairness, there are a number of positive comments on the iTunes Ap store.

6 comments
:

I'm right there with you on this - in fact the day I added the app to my iPhone I tweeted with someone from GoMeals. Did you do a simple search of "skim milk"? Ridiculous what it came up with. The rep from GM told me they are working on making the database more intutitive. Then when I tried to locate a cup of coffee nearby (restaurant) - it found a Dunkin' Donuts more than 4 miles from my house. There are at least 2 within 2.5 miles and 2 Starbucks within the same distance. The rep told me they will be adding more restaurants to the data base soon. I then tweeted to ask how to add a food to the data base. Then I tweeted to find out how to remove food from the plate. I did not RTFM, but IMHO an app such as this should be very user friendly and not require any reading. I suggested they look at LoseIt - a free app.

Most meal apps leave more than a bit to be desired... different ones leave different things. My current app of choice is The Daily Plate. They've recently come up with an iPhone app for it, but I can access the Web 2.0 version through my normal cellphone-with-browser. Scrolling through a Web page on a normal cellphone is a pain in the [expletive deleted], worse, looking for which of the 200 entries for your generic food was correctly input and has the serving size listed in the units of your choice. (Note most apps don't convert package-serving-size or standard-serving-size into weight and/or volume, and "bell pepper, green, raw, 1 medium" can be anything from 57 g (per some apps) to 120 g (what mine usually weigh)...)

Not sure what would be a good method without bogging down the works trying to get a single set of information...